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I normally don't bother writing about stuff like this any more,
because I was just so tired of talking about it by the time I quit
Netscape and AOL.
I'd said my piece in my resignation letters, and didn't really have
anything more to add.

I even manage to studiously ignore the messages I see every time
mozilla.org announces a new alpha
release: invariably some twinkie will pop up out of nowhere and claim
that the fact that mozilla.org is asymptotically closer to maybe
someday actually releasing an end-user product means that somehow I've
been proven wrong about something. They usually say something about
``this ought to teach jwz a lesson!'' I just don't get that. My point
was not that mozilla.org would never be able to finish the product: my
point was that they were already a year late, and showed every
indication of being even later. Which they have been: it's now more
than two years later, and they still haven't finished it.
Even if they had finished it six months ago, my reasons for leaving
would still have been valid: that mozilla.org did not manage to ship an
end-user product in any kind of reasonable timeframe, and that I was
tired of waiting. I had certain goals, and I didn't see those goals
being met.

But enough about that. I wish the Mozilla group the best of luck,
and I do hope someday to be using their software to browse the web.
But I'm definitely glad that I've left the computer industry, and have
spent the last two years doing new and exciting things of my own,
rather than having spent it continuing to flog away at Netscape's
orphan. I have my own
behind-schedule and over-budget project to work on now.

Recently, a reporter asked me some questions, and I responded.
Since I'd already typed up my answers, I decided I might as well
publish it here, since other people ask me this kind of thing with some
regularly. Some of the questions made me cringe, but I guess sometimes
those are the best kind of questions to answer.

What do you think of where Netscape is now, and what its prospects
are for the future?

Netscape is nowhere, since Netscape no longer exists. There is
no longer a company called Netscape. It ceased to exist in 1999, when
AOL bought it. The Netscape ``brand'' is still being used by
AOL/Time-Warner, but there is no ``Netscape'' any more. Just
AOL/Time-Warner and the many names under which it does business.
That's important to remember, because whatever nostalgia you might
have for Netscape-the-company, it is no more.

Ok, what do think of the Netscape brand's fortunes at the
moment?

I don't know what ``brand fortunes'' means, but I don't think much of
Netscape's products these days. But that's to be expected, since nearly
all of the brilliant people Netscape once employed left for more promising
and more innovative companies long ago.

What are the major hurdles facing the Netscape brand?

I really don't care whether the Netscape brand is in the
public eye. That's just a name, that's just a label. It would be nice
if some of the products I had worked on were still of relevance,
but they seem not to be.

Their major hurdles would be to either: ship a kick-ass web
browser, and ship it about three years ago (oops, too late!); or make
people think ``portals'' matter (oops, too late!)

How would you rate AOL's oversight of the Netscape brand?

I don't really understand why they bought Netscape at all. Maybe
it was simply to prevent the Netcenter portal (the monstrosity that the
Netscape home page had become) from competing with AOL. They certainly
didn't buy Netscape for the browser, especially given AOL's recent
announcement that they're standardizing on Internet Explorer.
In 1998, I wrote, ``it's
hard to imagine that [AOL] would spend $4 billion dollars on Netscape
just to throw away the client.'' But that would appear to be exactly
what they have done.

What are your thoughts about AOL's contiuned reliance on
Microsoft's browser? And do you think AOL will switch to the Netscape
browser anytime soon?

I can't imagine that AOL would ever switch to a Netscape browser
until such a time as the Netscape browser software is notably better
than Internet Explorer. And that seems extremely unlikely at this
point, given the huge headstart they've ceded to Microsoft already.

Do you think the AOL/Time-Warner merger will have any
impact on the Netscape division?

I don't know what Time Warner's motivations are intentions are; but
if I had to guess, I'd guess that the current incarnation of the
Netscape division is beneath their notice.

The thing that concerns me about the Time-Warner acquisition is
that it's yet another example of centralization of control: now we have
a company who own a
huge part of the
news,
music,
magazine,
motion picture,
and
television
industries also having control, via AOL, of one of the primary channels
by which the general public gets online. That kind of vertical
integration and massive captive audience is not healthy for a free
society. It leads inevitably to a reduction of choices and a reduction
of viewpoints that can become heard.

That kind of control of the entire communication infrastructure,
from content creation, through marketing, to end-user delivery, is just
a disaster as far as true Democracy goes. I wrote about this concern,
pre-Time/Warner, near the end of my
AOL resignation letter, and the situation has
only gotten more dire since then.

It will fade from view, and nobody will notice. It will become an
historical footnote, like
NCSA Mosaic
has become. Meanwhile, through their ownership of AOL, you can expect
Time/Warner to do their best to ensure that their own properties are
the only choices people see.

This acquisition sullies the once-great Netscape name by making it
a part of a corporate juggernaut no less dangerous than Microsoft. It
means that not only did Netscape lose their struggle with Microsoft,
but now they've become what they fought against.

[Netscape's new president] said that it is irrelevant
whether AOL's service adopts the Netscape browser, because it
wouldn't generate any more money for Netscape. The browser is free,
after all, and the start page would still be AOL.

That's the kind of myopia that killed Netscape.

If Netscape (or AOL, or anybody else) had a popular, but
free, browser product, that product would have enormous value to
the company, and the reason is not that people are too lazy to
change their default home page.

The value would be in the fact that a lot of people out in the real
world used that browser, which means that Microsoft would have to
actually abide by the open standards, in the interest of
interoperability.

Here's how it works: if people running web sites know that 70%
of their customers use one browser, and 30% use another browser, then
they will build web sites that work with both. The common denominator
between the two competitors will be the standard (de facto or de
jure, it doesn't matter).

However, if people running web sites believe that 99.9% of their
customers use one browser, then they won't bother making sure their
site works with anything else. And when Microsoft gives them some new
toy to play with, they won't even realize that they're being
locked in to something closed and proprietary.

The end result of this is that Microsoft unilaterally sets the
standards, and becomes even harder to compete with in any
domain.

That matters not only to AOL (in their role as browser
manufacturer) but to everyone who might have to compete with Microsoft
(which is anyone who hopes to become successful, since Microsoft
feels they are in every business.)

If Microsoft controls the standards, then they can change them at a
whim, as an incredibly powerful weapon against their competitors.

AOL, of course, has as lousy a track record of using and following
open standards as Microsoft does. So it's unlikely they understand
what is obvious to so many of us, that open standards are
critically important to the functioning of the Internet.
Open standards are what made all of this possible at all.